Carbonite Stacks the Deck With 5-Star Reviews 197
The Narrative Fallacy writes "In the aftermath of disclosures that Belkin employees paid users for good reviews on Amazon, David Pogue reports in the NYTimes that Carbonite has gone one better with 5-star reviews of its online backup services written by its own employees. Pogue recounts how Bruce Goldensteinberg signed up for the backup service, and all went well until his computer crashed and he was unable to restore it from the online backup while Carbonite customer support kept him on hold for over an hour. Frustrated, Goldensteinberg started reading Carbonite reviews on Amazon and a few of them seemed suspicious. 'They were created around the same date — October 31, 2006 — all given 5 stars, and the reviewers all came from around the Boston, MA area, where Carbonite is located,' including a review by Swami Kumaresan that read more like a testimonial. 'It turned out that Swami Kumaresan is the Vice President of Marketing for Carbonite. His review gives no indication that he is employed by the company.' Another review posted by Jonathan F. Freidin extols Carbonite without mentioning Freidin's position as Senior Software Engineer at Carbonite. 'It doesn't matter to me that Carbonite's fraudulent reviews are a couple of years old,' writes Pogue. 'These people are gaming the system, deceiving the public to enrich themselves. They should be deeply ashamed.'"
Not In Good Graces Error Reporting (Score:0, Interesting)
Look to the spamwars of Amazon on the release date of Spore -- that's how easy it is just don't be too obvious. If you want decent reviews then you'll have to rely on experience and reading material such as Consumer Reports.
I'm not surprised... (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you heard their ads? They sound like a scam just from that. Or at the very least, they use the annoying advertising tactic of making other options sound way worse than they are, like an infomercial. I hate that company just from their ads, I'm not surprised they really are shady.
-Taylor
Greed (Score:3, Interesting)
You're assuming they have morals.
Sometimes I wonder - how often do good people in a ruthless business environment actually remain good people? Sometimes I wonder whether the ultra-competitive nature of business causes upstanding moral people to turn into greedy fucks who have lost their original principles and instead turned to making money at all costs.
Kinda scares me, what our capitalistic society sometimes forces people to become to survive in business. Assuming, of course, that I'm not just being naïve and that these people were simply without scruples before they started to cheat their customers with shonky reviews and what else.
Oh man, I worked in a company that did this... (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh man, I worked in a company that did this all the time - positive reviews submitted by employees of the company on various sites, posing as customers of the company. It is a successful and respected online company.
The culture of a place can go a long way to convincing employees that this is the normal thing to do, and that it's just a part of doing business in this competitive world. Brings to mind Stanley Milgram's obediance experiments.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment [wikipedia.org]
Many fake reviews are easy to spot (Score:5, Interesting)
Just click on the reviewer and see if they have reviewed anything else and if they have, if it's a diverse range of stuff. I remember seeing a set of self-help books get either really poor reviews or really great ones. I clicked on the 5 star reviews and many of the reviewers were either one time reviewers, or they had a history of favorably reviewing a small circle of self-help books from a specific publisher or author. Often within a tight timeframe rather than anything spaced out between reviews.
I'm sure the reverse is true in circumstances, competing manufacturers giving their competitors' products a poor review. With the same tell-tale signs.
Amazon is very attractive to scam in this fashion although I'm sure sites like epinions and others are becoming targets as well. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if there are much more sophisticated systems in place than the ones uncovered lately with Belkin and all. What we have been seeing seems all very amateurish - and considering that, after price, having a good star rating at one of these sites may bring in or cost thousands of sales - I would think some manufacturers have to have departments hired to fill the internet with favorable reviews on amazon and other sites, as well as writing blogs or recommendations on blogs with some amount of finesse. Where their employees actually become believeable characters with a bit of history and diversity - perhaps reviewing the other odd item here and there, just enough to be convincing. In fact, they could make put these characters on file and have them become year long projects that become bit reoccuring players in the marketing process.
How often at slashdot (Score:4, Interesting)
I know quite a few people that do that. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a normal operating procedure.My ex-boss asked me to make a 5 star rating for him on one site because his legit (if not state-of-the art) anti-spyware program was listed as an adware/spyware provider.
http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/pcsafe.com
Take a look at the comments. The users "johnatsearching" and "wright" are the from the guy that owns the company. Looking back, he must have made 20 comments to bump up his rankings on the site. He even got his employees into it.
Only one person there mentioned that they were employed by the company. That's sad.
Which means (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not In Good Graces Error Reporting (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to write books, and I hated the fact that you lived and died by the sword of Amazon. And I knew that some authors were gaming their books with better ratings.
While I am not the worlds best writer, I do feel I ok and give my readers some useful information. I don't feel that my books are a waste of money.
Having said that it hurts when your book does really well, and then it is knocked back by the competition. I had a book that hit the top rated, and it was being ranked higher than one of the competition. The competition got some reviewers out and knocked my book back.
I stopped buying at Amazon since I can get cheaper books at a1books.
Re:I'm not surprised... (Score:1, Interesting)
Not being in the US, no. But I remember hearing a few years back that they'd decided to exploit their router customers by insert ads into the router's http traffic. That alone was enough to make me never buy ANYTHING Belkin again.
Re:Deeply ashamed? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Conflict of Interest" is not a criminal offense. You might have a civil case for fraud, but I doubt seriously if any criminal charges would ever be filed, let alone upheld in a court.
Alright, I'll bite. As a consumer, how can I start suing them?
There's a market for this stuff, apparently (Score:4, Interesting)
The company I work at was approached by a guy; conversation went along the lines of "Hi, you look like a good company, but I've never heard of you or seen advertisements" "We find the 'happy customer' approach to marketing works well enough on its own" "That is good. Say, I have possibility to stimulate communities to talk about [company name]. So, I can help you have all your news and services discussed constantly distinctive features spotlighted, etc by independence observers. The number of positive reviews and mentoring of your company will increase in natural way"
Further mails were then directed to /dev/null, but I wonder how many companies would have taken him up on the offer...
Amazon Reviewers ... (Score:1, Interesting)
I write reviews of products that I purchase on Amazon - over 20 of them. I've added photos to some - a backpack that didn't have any good photos.
Anyway, a recent review of a TV got a comment back that I needed to read the manual to see that I wasn't using the inputs correctly. The guy said he didnt have the TV, but for some reason decided to
a) read my review
b) pull the manual to verify complete accuracy
c) write a response to point out where my issues with the set were wrong
Seller motive or someone out to clean up amazon reviews? I don't think this was another buyer, like everyone else on amazon.
I responded to his comments, pointing out that I could be wrong on a few points, then providing a 2 month of use review.
I don't believe that (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not saying that there are no unethical businesses, but I believe that most transactions are done in good faith. Maybe it is the field that I have chosen, but most business relationships that I encounter on a day-to-day basis are built on mutual trust and common goals. In fact, if I didn't trust my vendors, I wouldn't do business with them. Period. If I can't rely on the product that they sell me, it is of no use to me. If my company's customers didn't trust the product that we sell, we would go out of business really, really fast. (I work in health care, so people could literally die). If you need a widget to help you perform your core competency, then you make the mistake of buying the cheapest alternative only once. Once you get into big business then having disruptions becomes way too costly to not have vendors and customers that you trust. Even saying that, usually when I run into problems I can more likely attribute the problem to incompetence rather than to malfeasance.
Obviously you have your Enrons, your Madoffs, and your Carbonites, but I think that the these cases are the exceptions rather than the rule.
Re:Not news (Score:5, Interesting)
Shows the value of the "MSM" (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course random, unknown people are not trustworthy. While it's trendy to criticize the "MSM" and 'old' media, they do have one essential advantage over crowd-sourced information: MSM publications have a reputation to protect:
1) They are not anonymous. As has often been observed, people are willing to say things anonymously on the Internet that they would never say to anyone's face, or if anyone knew who was speaking.
2) They have an enormous investment in their reputation: Millions (or more) in business, hundreds of jobs, and a reputation that's been built up over decades or more.
3) They have a track record: You know (or can know) the history of their integrity.
Certainly that does not make MSM 100% trustworthy; they are not. But at least when I read David Pogue in the NY Times, for example, I know whom I'm dealing with and I can make a judgment about the chance of and degree to which he might be shilling something.
Re:Many fake reviews are easy to spot (Score:5, Interesting)
If Amazon is so attractive to scamming, how about some counter-examples? Can anyone suggest a site whose reviews they really trust?
I can think of two. First is cpap.com. Sometime after delivery, they send a couple of reminders asking you to rate the products you bought. Since these are durable medical goods whose performance directly and significantly impacts the lives of the users, we tend to want to say what we think, good or bad. I find the reviews on that site very trustworthy, assuming several are posted and you take the time to read them all.
Next up is Newegg.com. For items with a number of reviews, reading all of them is a darn useful thing. I tend to select the option to read all the reviews and then put them in "worst first" order. Often, an item will get a bad review because of a small percentage of DOAs or if it has some particular flaw that may not apply to me. In those cases, I can ignore the bad reviews and purchase with confidence. Generally, lots of reviews == reviews you can trust, but even the products with just a few reviews can, depending on the quality of the reviews, be successfully differentiated. As an added plus, newegg gives me a fun place to watch fanbois rant and rave.
As a postscript, I've been burned in the oddest venues, too. I once watched a conversation develop on a small web site devoted to an arcane shooting sport. Someone said they had specially adapted carrying cases to sell and posted a picture. Someone else chimed in and said they had bought one and loved it. A few were sold and over the course of the next few weeks, a half-dozen people (all known to me, all people I would run into at meatspace gatherings eventually) posted nice comments. So - I ponied up $65 for one. I would have been willing to pay double for high quality. What I got was something I wouldn't have paid $20 for if I had been able to see it in person. The quality of construction was merely passable. The details of the design were sloppy. I finally concluded that in this intimate setting, people were just unwilling to admit they had been (slightly) cheated. They were unwilling to call the maker out in front of his friends. They were unwilling to tell previous posters that their standards were laughably low. Instead, a sort of groupthink/let's not make any waves/we're all friends here vibe took hold and people wound up wasting money. I thought that was weird at first. Then I realized that I was consciously deciding to not post any comments since I didn't want to badmouth an "extended family in the sport" member and start some useless drama.
Funny dynamic, there.
My point, overall, is that reviews and their usefulness are both better and worse than we expect, often at the same time. Generally, the only way to know for sure if the reviews are any good is to have enough subject matter expertise that you don't need to read the reviews in the first place. Damn shame, that.
Shame on the mods! (Score:3, Interesting)
Regulations aren't the same thing as consensus. Regulations are often rammed down the throats of an unwilling and uncooperative populace by a self-interested minority seeking to use those regulations to benefit themselves a bit more than everyone else.
that would be because the regulation known as "fairness doctrine" was removed from news organizations, meaning they no longer have to provide both sides of a story. This has turned the news into a propaganda mouthpiece for whoever has the most money or power in a given argument.
Regulation and yet more laws in a binder already full to bursting is not the solution.
you're absolutely right, optimization is required: get rid of the bloat. You, however, are proposing anarchy--the same anarchy which led to the collapse of our financial system.
Without "cops", the criminals run free. With too many cops, you have no privacy and no self-determination. The street moves in both ways, not just one.
Trying to legislate socialistic values leads to something that history has already told us will fail: Communism.
I guess its time to repeal those laws against fraud, murder, theft.. after all, it's your responsibility to make informed decisions and protect your own property.
this trollish dreck gets moded up? shame on you!
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Something you may be interested to read: (Score:3, Interesting)
From: Chris
Date: Tue, March 13, 2007 2:55 pm
To: Editor
Hi Ken:
I just read the above-mentioned article on your site (and the article you personally wrote about the BBB as well), and, yes, the BBB isn't what it appears to be.
I used to work for them, in both Los Angeles CA and Portland OR.
Here's an overview of how the BBB operates -
Companies are recruited into the Better Business Bureau, and every company that becomes a new member pays monthly membership dues.
These dues are based on the overall size of the company (specifically, the number of branch offices and the number of total employees in one city or town, fees are adjusted on a sliding scale).
The more branches and the more emloyees a company actually has, the more expensive their monthly dues will be.
I was a field rep for the BBB. Part of my job involved recruiting new companies into the BBB.
All companies that had "complaints" filed against them were considered "hot leads".
The field reps would call up the companies that had complaints filed against them, and talk to the person who handled each company's checkbook (or branch office's checkbook)...and that person would summarily be informed that there was an outstanding complaint (or complaints) on file against them, and did they realize this?
The representative for the company in question would usually have no clue about the complaint on file at the BBB, and after we made the company's representative nervous by informing them of the complaint, we would then immediately segue into talking about the benefits of membership in the Better Business Bureau...
An appointment would then be set for the field rep to "drop on by and discuss membership benefits, and a proper way for us to handle that complaint" (wink wink).
All companies and/or businesses in any given city or town in the USA are categorized primarily in three different ways -
1) Companies with ZERO complaints on file. (Not much need for the company to join the BBB, since they have no complaints on file.)
2) Companies with complaints on file, for which said companies have been non-responsive. (In other words, these companies have complaints on file but they have never responded to them - these companies are PRIME candidates for BBB membership - wink.)
3) Companies with complaints on file, for which said companies have been responsive. (In other words, these companies have complaints on file and they HAVE responded to those complaints.)
Now, there are some subtleties to this whole thing obviously.
In Portland, I used to work quite closely with the Director of the Portland Bureau, and with her Assistant Director, and one time I recruited a very large, well-known furniture and appliance rental company that charged monthly fees to its clients that were usurious to say the least. Since this company had about 20 branches in the Portland area, and a bunch of employees, their monthly fees for membership to the BBB were quite substantial. (A couple of thousand dollars a month, when all was said and done.)
This company had HUNDREDS of complaints on file with the BBB at the time I signed them up. Once we got the company's first membership check in our hot little hands, that company's BBB "report" suddenly changed and they received what amounted to a good rating on the Bureau's call-in phone service. (People can call the BBB nationwide, and get an automated report on virtually any company.)
But this is standard operating procedure for ANY company that becomes a BBB member.
To explain this a bit more - the automated report for this particular company suddenly became warm and fuzzy after we got their money..."This company has been responsive to all complaints that have been filed against it...this company is a member of the Better Business Bureau...", etc.
So that's how the operation works. The BBB NEVER eliminates all complaints that are on file for a particular company (because they don't have to...there's more than one way to s
crass diatribe of the week (Score:3, Interesting)
Untruthful, damaging speech is not protected.
If you're stupid enough to have not figured out that "freedom of speak" is constrained by context, and you wade into every malfeasance discussion on the wooden "freedom of speech" horse, you've exercised the most basic freedom of all: to open your mouth and make a fool of yourself.
In a small town, it's amusing to have a town drunk. In a large city, by the time enough drunks assemble together to make a skid row, it becomes a tedious affair. Unfortunately, slashdot offers security in numbers, so there's a permanent September surplus of town drunks to remind us of the peril of opening mouth before engaging brain. Imagine a world where every movie contains seven FBI warnings. Doesn't take much imagining, does it?
I also get pissed off about the IANAL meme. Why are we giving lip service to a profession who won't refactor their code base to the point where mere mortals can understand it? Most of the time, the lawyers themselves don't understand it, the difference being that after paying $300/hour for legal advice, you can sue your lawyer if the legal advice obtained is hopelessly incorrect (though you'll rarely succeed, and you stand to lose more than you'll gain).
In America, it seems everyone has the right to offer legal-sounding advice. And the other party (apparently, for reasons I find hard to justify) has the right to sue you if you fail to designate yourself IANAL, or otherwise club the tragically gullible or conniving reader with a clue stick. (Strangely difficult to tell those two groups apart. They seem to unite under the banner of "born complainers".)
It's the same deal with commercial endorsements. Speak away, but if you represent the firm in an official capacity, don't forget to add IANADTP: I am not a disinterested third party.
Even if you're not litigated, you'll still look like a tool if discovered. Unfortunately, on the internet, tools enjoy security in numbers, so I'm all for litigation whenever it can be managed. Generally speaking, prosecution against commercial astroturfing rarely culminates in a criminal conviction until the offense is large enough to make organized crime salivate. Estimating a population of 100,000 scumbags and tools, there might be 20 convictions a year, and only half of these where the punishment exceeds the reward (the ultra tools who didn't know when to stop, or got their noses too deep into the blow).
Even if this idiot loses his job over this (unlikely), I doubt he'll be long unemployed. It's not much of a career move for a guy like this to begin astroturfing penny stocks, and he has no apparent scruples against it.
I wish we could move this annoying IANAL meme into the browser. In the license agreement for the user agent, there would be a tick box "I am a gullible and/or conniving douche bag". For these people, the browser would add to every page rendered (in big red letters at both the top and the bottom) "The text contained on this page does not constitute legal advice unless the author explicitly identifies it as such and backs it up with legal credentials". Those of us who arrogantly tick this box off would rarely see the IANAL meme ever again. Good riddance if you ask me.